Wednesday, 24 August 2016

“Looks like the Pareto Principle has been proven to be
correct once again…. Don't mean to sound cynical but whether people are
becoming poorer and desperate or expressing deep discontent, nothing is going
to change. The [top] 20 percent are still going to dictate terms with their
immense control over media and money.”

The quote above is one thoughtful reader’s response to
the US presidential election campaign as Donald Trump appears to be losing
ground, largely through his own off-the-cuff bigotry and xenophobia, and the
leftist challenge of Bernie Sanders seems to have fizzled out as the Democratic
party unifies behind Hillary Clinton to defeat their common enemy: Donald Trump.

The Pareto Principle – named after the work of Italian
political sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), is part of a larger theory
that may be summed up as the inevitability and “naturalness” of elite power.
The history of power in all societies everywhere is one of elites – some
fox-like and cunning (elite democracy?), others leonine and masculine (rule by
force) – circulating in an endless series of births, deaths and re-births. And
quite right too, ‘elitists’ assert.

So whatever the political label or rhetoric, elites always
rule. The Pareto Principle contends that about 20% of any population basically
produces 80% of the desired results – whether we refer to police officers
fighting crime or teachers educating students, or ownership of wealth and the
earning of income. Adding to this tradition, other major elite theorists, such
as Robert Michels, argued for an iron law of oligarchy: whichever political
party – revolutionary or reactionary, fascist, communist or democratic,
conservative or liberal – gains power, it is bound to be ruled by an elite
minority that is better organised, more gifted, and effective, justly easing
out the masses from real power.

Elitism certainly has a ring of truth about it, and
confirms the cynic in their cynicism – that nothing ever truly can or ever will
change. But its take on reality suggests that the future looks just like the
past, defying radical historical shifts in power – between classes or races or
nations, for example.

Elitists like Pareto seemed to revere hereditary
aristocracies where the ‘talents’ reigned supreme and democracy posed a threat,
and Marxism threatened complete annihilation. Pareto’s birth in 1848 – a year
of democratic revolutions in Europe as well as the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, and his death in 1923 in an era of rising fascism, tells its
own story of fear of change and a desire to return Italy to the past glories of
the Roman empire.

The end point of Pareto’s predictions is also open to
question and worth exploring in the US context. The change that Sanders and
Trump represent is explicable only in the context of recent political history –
increasing dissatisfaction with elites on Right and Left exemplified by
insurgencies from the Tea Party and Occupy Wall St, respectively. The Occupy
movement became nationwide, involved millions of people and expressed deep
discontent and anger, much of it shared among tea partiers on the right, especially
in the areas of military spending, corporate welfare, and opposition to special
interests, especially the big banks that were bailed out by taxpayers after the
2008 financial meltdown.

Those movements were the tinder-wood for the Trump and
Sanders insurgencies against their respective party elites in the 2016
primaries. That, according to American sociologist Alvin Gouldner, means where
there is an iron law of oligarchy, there is an equal and opposite law of
struggle for democracy, an axiom especially true in the modern era. It is just
a matter of time before the democratic eruption comes.

It might be worth considering another Italian thinker
– Antonio Gramsci – who wrote about intellectual hegemony, political power, and
political transformation: hegemony is almost always contested more or less
openly and maintaining hegemony is no easy process. Gramsci offers hope through
struggle and exposes the superficiality and inherent instability of elite
domination, its openness to challenges from below. Gramsci died in one of
Benito Mussolini’s prisons but practised what he preached – “pessimism of the
intellect, optimism of the will” – and his work inspired millions to keep
pushing for change, because change itself is inevitable, given time and the
balance of power between the status quo and change makers, those who make real
history.

Apply that principle to history and we see that things
do change even if the change is partial, incomplete and unsatisfactory to many
– the end of apartheid in South Africa, political independence for the colonial
world, relative peace in Northern Ireland, major advances in racialized power
in the United States, the transformation in women’s rights across (most of) the
world.

And if we apply Gramsci to American politics today,
perhaps we might see a more complex picture – movements for change albeit tempered
by a reassertion by status quo forces, the tentative, uncertain steps towards domestication
of a radical agenda with the original impulse hardly extinguished.

Hence, we see that Hillary Clinton and her running
mate Tim Kaine have been forced to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership
agreement by the power of the Sanders movement, and because of its appeal to
rust-belt white workers, a portion of which are die-hard Trump supporters.

Clinton may not be a fully convinced opponent of Wall
St and big money politics – after all, she and Bill make millions annually in
speaking fees from the likes of UBS and Goldman Sachs – but she does feel the
changing direction of the political wind. We may see some movement on a
financial transactions tax on speculative behaviour, strengthening of the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Senator Elizabeth Warren fought to
establish, and action against corporate concentration.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s reputation has been
enhanced by her stream of effective attacks on Donald Trump, and her campaign
to rein in the power of the big banks seems to have been renewed by the Sanders
movement. Sanders is acting as a major sponsor of the Warren-John McCain bill
to restore key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act – passed in the wake of the
Wall Street crash of 1929 but repealed 70 years later by President Bill
Clinton. The Act had prevented banks from speculating with ordinary peoples’ hard-earned
savings. Hillary Clinton is committed to pushing a modernised version of
Glass-Steagall.

The necessity of higher wages – backed by a new
federal minimum wage of $15 per hour – was forced on Clinton by Bernie
Sanders’s representatives on the Democratic platform committee at the national
convention.

Hillary Clinton was also forced to flip-flop on the
abolition of college tuition fees – she is now committed to making state
universities and colleges free for students from families earning less than
$125K annually – over 80% of all students.

From significant plans for an infrastructure bank to
lead the renewal of America’s roads, railways, ports and bridges, to higher
taxes on the 0.1% of top income earners, to a public option for healthcare cost
reduction, to greater intra-party democracy, including reforming the
super-delegates system, Bernie Sanders’s legacy may yet live on should Clinton
win the White House.

As Professor Bastiaan van Apeldoorn of the Free
University of Amsterdam argues, “The old order may no longer be sustainable; but
we may be witnessing an interregnum, with the old order dying and a new one
struggling to be born. The choice may increasingly [have to] be one between a
real radical (left) reformism or fascism or Trumpism” or whatever form white
ethno-nationalist bigotry may take.

“These are critical, transformative, times,” Apeldoorn
comments. “With the (still likely) election of Clinton the neoliberal,
Open Door, elite will get another lease of life but I cannot imagine it will be
a sustained return to normalcy. Both the Trump and Sanders campaigns have made
that clear.”

It may not be quite the political revolution Sanders
demanded, but it is a major step away from the Trump counter-revolution, and an
important nod towards the demands of the Sanders movement, and parts of Trump’s
working class political base, and possibly a slightly fairer society. Things
could be a lot worse.

But the cost to the American people will have to be
paid in energetic vigilance – to ensure a level of democratic political
mobilisation to guard against a smooth return to ‘normalcy’ and the Pareto
Principle. The new normal needs protection.

Thursday, 11 August 2016

Red lines had been crossed, insults against numerous groups
hurled, anti-elite charges of being out of touch advanced, accusations of
treachery and selling the country out to subversives and foreigners made,
repeatedly and with seemingly little political consequence, but the end came
when there was a concerted attack on one of America’s most revered institutions
– the US Army. This was part of the downfall of US Senator Joseph McCarthy in
1953-4; he had gone too far, was out of control, and bringing elite
anti-communism, a mainstay of cold war America’s justification for global
expansion, into disrepute. Could it also be the beginning of the end of
Republican contender, Donald Trump’s, presidential campaign? Has he gone too
far even for hard-core right-wing Republicans who have fostered the very
political culture from which Trumpism sprang? And, with the turning and defanging
of Bernie Sanders’s leftist assault on Wall St, has American politics returned
to normalcy, with the establishment firmly back in the cockpit?

Anti-communist US Senator Joseph McCarthy had decided, in
discussions with that other Machiavellian Richard M. Nixon, that his road to
fame and possibly the White House lay in exposing the communist takeover of
America. From the boy scouts and girl guides, to the Protestant church to the
White House, America was riddled with corruption and weakened by communist
fifth-columns, and he was going to “take our country back”, as it were. Adding
to a broad anti-communist and anti-liberal movement, which included the House
Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), McCarthy went after practically
every organisation in America, except the KKK, FBI and the GOP, and wreaked havoc
among federal employees, thousands of whom lost their jobs, were blacklisted,
or worse. He spoke, the media amplified his message by largely uncritical
reporting, and heads rolled. He seemed invincible, his witch-finder-general
role popular, and road to the White House assured. President Eisenhower frowned
upon but refused to condemn or repudiate McCarthy; he happily tolerated, and
supported, the construction of an existential Soviet threat as the basis of a
foreign policy of anti-communist containment.

Yet, the Wisconsin senator’s aura of Teflon-like invincibility was finally
torpedoed when he went so far as to attack America’s cherished military, the
near-universal support for its warriors especially those who had fought the
“good war” a mere decade earlier. During the US Army hearings of 1953, McCarthy
called General Ralph Zwicker, a much decorated soldier, as having the
intelligence of a five year old child and declared him “not fit” to wear an
Army uniform. He later tried to destroy the career of a young US army lawyer, Fred
Fisher, denouncing him as a fellow traveller of communism and membership of the
bastion of communism in the USA, the National Lawyers’ Guild. This attack led
the US army’s lead counsel, Joseph Welch, a Boston blue-blood Republican, to
declare: “You've done enough. Have you no sense
of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” From
that point, the American public turned away from McCarthy and viewed him as
cruel, manipulative, and dangerous, as did the US ‘moderate’ right-wing
political elite. His fall from grace was rapid thereafter – he was censured by
the Senate and he faded away, dying of alcohol poisoning in 1956.

Yet, McCarthy’s censure was on the grounds of conduct unbecoming a US
senator – ungentlemanly behaviour, not on the pain and suffering he caused
untold numbers of people. The GOP had had enough of McCarthy once his fiery
anti-communism, once a powerful tool against the Democrats, had brought
anti-communism itself into disrepute. He was out of control and took the rap. The
man was disowned, but the anti-Red campaign continued. McCarthyism without
McCarthy.

Trump’s attacks on Khizr and Ghazala Khan in response the
DNC speech of the father of a soldier son killed in action in Iraq, and
subsequently on the son’s mother as silenced by the father’s Islamic beliefs,
has led to outrage in general and among some Republicans as well. But although
many Republican leaders have criticised Trump they have largely refused to
repudiate him as their party’s candidate.

Trump’s defence against Khan’s accusation that he the GOP’s
nominee had sacrificed nothing for his country – he’s created thousands of jobs
– rang hollow. Khan called for him to step down from the election race, as
unfit to lead America, followed by President Obama’s own invitation to the GOP
to jettison Trump as their candidate.

Trump’s retaliatory attack on the Khans follows disrespect
for the Vietnam war record of Senator John McCain, who’d spent several years as
a prisoner of war. And his subsequent trivialisation of a purple heart from an
admiring veteran of the Iraq war. But, McCain has yet to reject Trump in an
election year and a tight race to retain his own Arizona senate seat.

As polls show Trump’s slump behind a 10-11% lead for Hillary
Clinton, and a concerted attack from the Right from the Veterans of Foreign
Wars and American Legion, anti-Trump forces are renewed; Clinton and Republican
senators and representatives are now more openly challenging Trump’s stance on
Putin’s aggression in the Ukraine, assertiveness in Syria; there are murmurs
about the GOP’s rules on replacing their duly elected nominee. Adding fuel to
fire, Trump alienated even more Republicans by initially failing to endorse the
candidacies of Republican senators and GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch
McConnell although his VP running mate, Mike Pence, publicly voiced his support
for the leaders. It’s all looking like a shambles of their own making.

Reinforcing their usual political allies, Republican donors from
corporate America are pulling the plug on the Trump campaign – the billionaire
Koch brothers remain unconvinced that Trump can be tamed by the GOP or Pence,
and are refusing to donate their fortunes to Trump’s faltering bid for the
presidency. Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard and many others have been recruited
by the Clinton campaign to both denounce Trump and back Hillary, adding another
GOP donor’s scalp to their tally, having already reeled in Michael Bloomberg. Republicans
like former Reagan-Bush appointee, Frank Lavin, are reassured by the
conservatism of the Democratic National Convention and Clinton’s selection of
Senator Tim Kaine as running mate. Commented Lavin: “I have an increasing
comfort level with Hillary Clinton…. She’s not going to be bossed around by the
Bernie Sanders wing of the party.” A Republicans for Hillary Group appears
imminent, pulling together existing smaller initiatives.

Yet, figures for June and July indicate a major surge in
small donations to Trump’s campaign. His grass-roots’ support among America’s
economically-disenfranchised, looked-down-uponnationalist and ethno-centric element of the white working class seems
to be holding; but even they might not like Trump’s disrespect for military
service. Rural southern whites join the US military in droves. But, as so
powerfully explained in J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly
Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, Trump is the only
candidate to speak their language and of their desperate plight.

The GOP donors’ and Democrats’ pincer movement appears to be
gaining momentum with dire implications for the Trump campaign but also for the
proclaimed radicalism of the Democrats (“the most radical platform in the
history of the party”), trying to hold on to millions of Bernie Sanders’s
voters. Trump’s anti-establishment credentials remain intact, while his
political credibility is increasingly tattered among sceptical Republicans.
Clinton’s base in the establishment, despite numerous anti-corporate passages
in the party’s manifesto – now more apparently a sop to the powerful but
defanged Sanders movement – seems stronger than ever.

The centre-ground, ever the preserve of the self-declared
‘moderate’ establishment, appears to be holding, but skewed heavily to the
Right, defying both the Sanders revolution and Trump’s attack on elite power
and its global over-reach.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at
City, University of London

Friday, 5 August 2016

The Democratic National Committee’s leaked emails preudo-drama
reveals far more than the real story at the heart of the matter – that apparently
neutral DNC discussed means to sabotage the Bernie Sanders primary election
campaign. It thereby violated its claims to political neutrality between rival
candidates and favoured Hillary Clinton, a party establishment darling.
Diverting attention from the substance of the charge of political bias, the DNC
first gently and politely nudged out its chair, Debbie Wasserman Shultz (to a very comfortable honorary position), and
then blamed the Russians for hacking party email servers in a bid to benefit
Putin’s (apparently) preferred candidate, Donald Trump. Trump, rising to the
elite politics game, added his own flavours to the mix and attributed a racial
slur to Putin against President Obama, and egged the Russians to continue
leaking more emails. In the age of post-truth politics, no evidence was
required for these claims but their job was done – eyes were on Russia, Trump,
etc and not on the DNC’s wrong-doing.

While deflecting attention from the original issue, the
episode also demonstrates why the United States is in political crisis today
and will remain so for some time to come. While large swathes of the electorate
scream from the pain of trying to make ends meet as real incomes fall and
inequality rises, health care costs increase, police violence against black men
reaches epidemic proportions, America’s infrastructure crumbles, and people look
to leaders who apparently offer ways out of the crisis, the American political
class has gone back to business as usual. They take or admit no responsibility
for the Iraq War or the financial meltdown of 2008, fail to mention the debacle
in Afghanistan, the massive increase of the power of Wall St corporations in
economic and political life. America’s problems today, it appears, have nothing
to do with the Republicans or Democrats.

This political amnesia is far more likely to damage the
Democrats than the GOP’s Donald Trump – the only candidate reflecting popular
anger against elite power; indeed it plays into his hands and boosts his
chances of winning the White House – unless, of course, he self-ignites
following one of his red-line crossing gaffes. This election was billed as
Hillary Clinton’s to lose – and she and her celebratory coterie, backed by big
money, appear to be heading into a very rough election season up to November.
It may be that Trump fails to win rather than Hillary defeats a candidate
President Obama has declared unfit for office.

Both parties’ conventions provide an insight into the crisis
of elite party politics today and the more significant conclusion that neither
party offers very much to their target voters. The GOP spent their convention
papering over the cracks in their party’s fabric and raison d’etre, attacking
the record of the Obama administration, and promising to make America great
again and give it back to its own people, code for the anti-minorities
xenophobia that galvanises an alliance between loyal Republicans and Trump’s
white working class core support. The latter have been regaled with tales of
jobs for all by abolishing free trade, and bashing the Chinese. But no support
for increasing the federal minimum wage or investment in crumbling roads and
bridges or schools has been offered. All the while, Trump built bridges to
party elites with his selection of Governor Mike Pence as vice presidential
running mate – a dyed-in-the-wool
tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-corporations-conservative from the tea party wing of
the GOP. Trump’s mission to restore America has no place for any redistribution
of income and wealth which is what a majority of Americans and large
proportions of Republican voters actually want. The only threat to GOP elites
backing Trump is from the billionaire candidates own penchant for outrageous
bigotry.

And the Democrats, convened in Philadelphia, and let off the
hook by Bernie Sanders’s full throated backing of Hillary Clinton, and pretended
the Sanders insurgency never happened even as Michelle Obama, President Obama
and nominee Clinton praised Bernie and started a major celebration of America’s
continuing greatness and of its status quo. This left them with one place to go
in focusing attention: Donald Trump.

Trump is not only at the centre of his own
campaign, he is also the Democrats’ sole target. No vision backed by specific
policies and programmes to curb the power of Wall St and big money in politics,
no job creation or infrastructure-building. To be sure, the Democratic platform
bears witness to the compromise with Sanders – on college tuition fees, health
care, federal minimum wage. But on the major question of the neoliberal order’s
attachment to globalisation and outsourcing of factory jobs, and the power of
big money in economy and politics, including bankrolling Hillary Clinton for
decades, and the gross levels of inequality that process has generated, there
is silence. Just more talk about how bad Trump is. Meanwhile Blackwater, one of
the world’s largest private equity funds, whose CEO sits on the board of the
Clinton-Obama think tank, the Center for American Progress, has held
fundraisers for Obama and Clinton, and who some tip as a future treasury
secretary, held a major reception in Philadelphia. And Hillary has received up
to $123 million from such Wall St denizens in contrast to a paltry $19000 (yes,
that’s $19K) donated to the Trump campaign. (Sanders received $0 from
corporations). Hillary has personally earned over $20 million from closed-door
speeches at Wall St firms. That’s why Clinton cannot even understand where
critics of corporate-cash-dominated politics are coming from – to her, this is
how normal politics works. Any plank of the Democrats’ platform needs to be
read in this context.

It is unsurprising that last week’s great celebration of the
glorious Obama years – also funded by major Wall St donors - failed to address
any deep-seated problems of American society; yet it plays directly into
Trump’s hands and threatens a smooth transfer of power from Obama to Clinton.
It permits two things: Trump appears as the change candidate, and he can turn
his guns onto Hillary Clinton in a race to the bottom on who’s part of the
establishment, closer to the people or Wall St, the more dishonest and corrupt.
And Trump is a lot better at playing that game than Clinton.

To Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, what’s
most disturbing about the Brexit and Trump debates “is that there is zero elite
reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to
both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority.” Trump
resonates, Greenwald commented, not due to popular stupidity but because people
feel cheated and let down by “the prevailing order…. that they can’t imagine
that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo.” People are so
angry with the way things are that they simply want out of the current position,
to throw out the existing elite, regardless of the consequences. This
anti-politics is precisely the core appeal of Trumpism, a phenomenon set to
outlive its eponymous hero.

The Trump and Sanders campaigns rode the deep discontents of
a nation all the way to Cleveland and Philadelphia, despite sabotage attempts
from party elites. The Sanders campaign has thrown in the towel and focuses on
Clinton versus Trump, forgetting the structural inequality that propelled
voters into its camp. Trump is in the process of betraying his core
constituency, enjoying the fun and games of elite party politics.

Business as usual, normalcy, has been restored – or, has it merely
been stored up for a future explosion?